Felix Atagong's Unfinished Projec

October 2009

20091008

Pink Dreams

Some exciting news arrived last weekend through a Pink Floyd portal.
Alex Paterson, head spinner of the band The Orb, said in an interview
that he and David Gilmour had entered a studio ‘to work on an album’.

The news was vague and titillating enough to make all kind of
assumptions. Did this mean that LX & DG were attempting a Fireman
trick à la Youth and Mc Cartney? Perhaps Alex had finally lured Dave in
his spider web with a little help from Guy Pratt who can be found as
bass player and co-composer on several Orb, Pink Floyd and David Gilmour
records from the past? (Pratt and Paterson also teamed up in a band
called The Transit Kings.)

The Orb's record output is prolific and even then a lot of tunes and
mixes stay hidden in the closet until LX decides to put them on a
compilation album somewhere. They just celebrated a third release in the Orbsessions
series from record company Malicious
Damage and according to some online reviews I read it is either
brilliant or utterly irritating, which makes it typically Orb, I guess.
I haven't bought Baghdad Batteries yet, my days that I ran to the
shop to get me their latest release are over as The Orb has left my
attention span somewhat thanks to the record Okie Dokie that
wasn't okie dokie at all but a mediocre Thomas Fehlmann album with the
brand name glued over it to sell a few extra copies more.

It took me over a year to listen to The Dream that followed Okie
Dokie and although it has Youth written all over it the result is pretty
average. Not pretty average as in pretty average but pretty
average as in pretty but nevertheless a bit average.
Probably I’ll get to Baghdad Batteries one of these days but I wouldn’t
hold my breath, if I were you…

Although one fan found that the announcement came about two decades and
a half too late the GilmOrb collaboration was making both Floyd and Orb
communities very excited but excitement is something David Gilmour does
not favour anymore in his line of work. This week the following comment
could be found on his official website…

David & Orb Rumours True – Up To A Point

Recent comments by ambient exponents The Orb's Alex Paterson that they
have been collaborating with David Gilmour are true – up to a point.
David has done some recording with The Orb and producer Youth, inspired
initially by the plight of Gary
McKinnon. However, nothing is finalised, and nothing has been
confirmed with regards to any structure for the recordings or firm
details re: any release plans.

20091016

Yellow

It has been the most wonderful week. After I had read a favourable
review of Douglas
Coupland’s Generation A in the newspaper I bought me
the book and I am in the middle of reading that one now. The story is
put in a future not so very far from now where bees have disappeared
altogether and the weather is constantly playing tricks on the
population, like suburban smog.

When apparently nothing common between them is found they are put back
into the world where they have troubles coping with their instant Youtube
superstar status. They all meet for the first time, because their stay
at the research centre was in splendid isolation, on a distant island
where the last beehive was ever found and that is now a UNESCO
world heritage site.

The island has turned in a Mad Max environment with murders being
committed on a daily base. The five get the assignment to tell stories
to each other, like the people in the Decameron,
because that might be a way to find out why the bees exactly choose them…

This week the new Orb
album also landed on my desk. It is called Baghdad Batteries and
was a pleasant surprise. It isn’t a masterpiece but I found it pretty
cool that they have returned to their ambient roots. It is pleasantly
soothing.

If anybody ever reads this shit it might be good to know that a couple
of months ago
I had some eye injections that made me exactly feel as if someone was
sticking a needle through my eye. This week I had some tests to see if
these injections had really worked or if they had just been a weird Dr.
Caligari experiment.

First I was summoned by one of the most ravishing women I have ever
seen, she made me read cards that went like DEFPOTEC
but all I could think of was that she could defpotec me all night
long. A while later, still in a happy mood, I was reading Generation A
by the way, I went to the picture man who was going to take pictures.

I had to roll up my sleeve and I was injected with a yellow contrast
fluid. The nurse warned me that I might look yellow; well not look
yellow, but that everything I would look at would appear yellowish.

Wow! All of a sudden I was feeling like Neil, the hippie, on a sunny
day, humming Daydream
Believer, although in my case, and I kid you not, a rather popular Coldplay
tune was ringing through my head.

Once home I had to take a leak, and my urine was fluorescently yellow as
if I had eaten a six-pack of Stabilo Boss marker-pens. If they
could make this thing in orange and pink it would be a great hit on
summer festivals around the world, I thought. Let’s all do a rainbow pee.

And today I also purchased me – what is officially titled –

DOUGLAS ADAMS’SHITCHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXYPART SIX
OF THREEAND ANOTHER THING

The book is written by Eoin
Colfer, with a name like that you become either a science fiction
writer or an Irish folk dancer, I guess, but Eoin didn’t take the easy
way out. But the book will have to wait until I finish Generation A.

I’m yellowy pissed anyway that for the first time in history a
hitchhiker book actually appears on the day that it was promised to
appear. At least they could’ve said on the twelfth of October that it
had all been a joke and that - to celebrate and honour Mr. Douglas Adams
- the book would appear in another timeframe.

20091025

Bad Moon Rising

This blog has been made with Thingamablog
that recently resurfaced with a new beta
version after nearly two years silence.

Since September Thingamablog, TAMB for short, has issued four beta
versions in the 1.5 series and hopefully we will see a RC (release
candidate) soon, but as there are still some bugs to sort out, it can
still take a little while.

The strong point about TAMB is that it creates static webpages that
behave like a dynamic blog. Although all hosting companies offer php and
MySQL enabled servers nowadays you usually have to pay (extra) to have
database access, at least in my country.

From the big web providers in Belgium, Belgacom offers a free blogging
solution (on their Skynet portal) but not on the webspace they’re giving
away with each subscription. The other major host Telenet experimented
with a blogging portal in 2005 but decided to stop as there are (too)
many free blogging
solutions out there.

In a recent interview on Uhusnest,
Bob Tandlinger, the developer of TAMB, shares some of his viewpoints
about TAMB and I happen to share most of these as well. Here are some
excerpts, but of course you are all invited to check the completeinterview.

Uhu: Some people might say that TamB is a bit "old school",
without online database handling like in wordpress or serendipity.

Bob: I would agree completely :) But I'd also say that being “old
school” isn't always a bad thing. I think we sometimes forget just how
much easier and straightforward things were back in the day. Wordpress,
for instance, has a ton of plug-ins for just about anything imaginable,
which is great. However, with all this flexibility comes quite a few
headaches as well. (…) Now, I'm not saying all this endless
customization is inherently a bad thing. But the fact is that the vast
majority of people simply do not care and do not want bothered with it.
If someone just wants to set up a blog to make a few posts every month,
is all that -really- necessary?

Other quotes from Bob Tandlinger in the same interview:

# I think this is the niche that Thingamablog fills. An easy to use
blogging platform that you are in complete control over.# It's
fairly easy to use and has a small learning curve. If you can use an
email client, you can use Thingamablog.# It works anywhere
regardless of what is supported on the server side. If you can FTP to
it, Thingamablog will most likely work with it.# It's easy to
experiment with and make blogs look how you want. No need to learn a new
programming language just to edit a template. The template syntax is
straight forward easy to understand.# You can maintain multiple
blogs on multiple different servers from a single program.

# Your blog data lives on your computer, not on some server in the
cloud. (This is either a good thing or not depending on your point
of view.)

Call it old fashioned but I like to keep my data by myself and if
something goes wrong, I’ll be to blame. If you buy a new PC nowadays you
see more and more that the computer companies give away some free backup
or storage room on their servers. I think this is a bit uncanny and I
smell a certain inconsistency realising that the same people who write Amnesty
International letters will have their letters hosted on a Chinese or
Korean server.

Not that American servers are more trustworthy, in the aftermath of nine
eleven some measures were taken that catapulted freedom of speech back
to the same level as, let’s say, the German Democratic Republic. Ok, the
previous sentence is a bit exaggerated but there are some conservative
forces at work that would like to see it happen. Little by little,
little mice are nibbling at our freedom, a bite (byte?) at the
time, and even Barack Obama is not able to put a halt on it, i.e. his
recent decision that freedom of speech will exclude blasphemous
expressions.

The European Union decided in 2006 (and they had been trying since 2002,
BTW) that all telecommunication providers will be obliged to keep the
records of phone and internet traffic for a period from 6 to 24 months
(Belgium will probably implement this law next year and has decided to
use the longest data
retention period).

One of the common clichés to make these kind of laws accepted by the
general public is the notion that innocent people have got nothing to
hide, implying that people who do object against privacy intrusion
implicitly have and are – by definition – guilty of state unfriendly and
even hostile behaviour.

By accepting the nothing to hide argument ”you are saying that it’s OK
for the government to infringe on the rights of potentially millions of
your fellow Americans, possibly ruining their lives in the process. (…)
It basically equates to “I don’t care what happens, so long as it
doesn’t happen to me.” (BJ Horn, as quoted in the essay.)

And so this entry that started as a celebration for the blogging
software Thingamablog turned into a rant after all.

Thingamablog’s tagline goes like this …because everyone has got
something to say… This little prick would like to add: …while you still
can…

If you download Thingamablog be sure to take the right version. At the
Sourceforge download
page you can only find TAMB 1.06 (official) and TAMB 1.1.6 (beta), but
these date from 2007. The download link to the 1.5 series can be found here
and it actually points to beta 4.